Israeli officials concerned over Hamas arms buildup

JERUSALEM Hamas is building its military capacity in the Gaza Strip, constructing tunnels and underground bunkers and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives, senior Israeli officials say.

Hamas, the dominant faction in the Palestinian government, had learned tactics from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which brought in and stored thousands of rockets in bunkers near the northern Israeli border before its war with Israel last summer, the officials, including a top military commander who spoke in an interview Friday, said.

In Gaza, Hamas has now recruited 10,000 fighters to its so-called Executive Force, a parallel police force intended to counter the control its rival Fatah exercises over the Palestinian Authority's security forces, the Israeli commander said. The Executive Force is now divided into five "so-called brigades, with battalion leaders" and is receiving more military training and sharing a common headquarters, he said, with the Qassam brigades, Hamas' military wing.

The commander, who gave the briefing at the request of The New York Times and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Hamas' improved rockets had a range of about 10 miles, which would allow them to hit the Israeli town of Ashkelon.

But he emphasized that despite Israel's growing concerns about Hamas, "we're not going to start a big operation in Gaza."

Still, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is under increasing pressure from the political right and from parts of the security establishment to deal with the Hamas buildup sooner rather than later. And no one rules out a major Israeli response if a rocket from Gaza produces significant Israeli casualties.

Yuval Diskin, the director of the Shin Bet internal security service, said recently in a briefing for journalists that "if the Hamas buildup continues, and the rockets and tunnels continue, at the end of the day we will have to do something about it."

He said that Egypt needed to do more to stop the smuggling of weapons, explosives and rockets into Gaza, and he said that Hamas had been able to send out "tens" of men for extensive military training in Iran, "with the promise of hundreds," which worried him more, he said, than any smuggled weapon.

Hamas has denied sending men to Iran for training, dismissing Israel's assertions as propaganda aimed at hurting the Palestinian government.

Israel may have an interest in asserting that the Palestinians are building an aggressive force. But it is known to have excellent electronic and human intelligence about Palestinian militias. Its claims about Hezbollah's buildup in recent years have proved to be accurate.

Recently, when Fatah accused Hamas of digging tunnels and bunkers from which to launch attacks on its men, Hamas spokesmen said the construction was to confront another Israeli raid and was not aimed at Fatah.

Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians have risen lately, and the intermittent cease-fire in Gaza is fraying. On Wednesday, Israeli forces carried out their first offensive operation in Gaza in months, attacking a cell of Islamic Jihad militants preparing to launch Qassam rockets into Israel.

In the past two weeks alone, the Israeli army says, more than 20 Qassams have been launched toward Israel, with at least five landing inside its territory, and an Israeli civilian, an electrical worker standing on a ladder in Israel near the border crossing, was shot by a Hamas member.

On Friday, on the grounds of a former Israeli settlement near Khan Yunis, a Hamas fighter was killed and nine more were wounded when explosives blew up during their military training.

The senior military commander said that after last summer's war in Lebanon, Israeli troops were training differently. Given the Hamas buildup in men and new weaponry, Israel now viewed a battle in Gaza as "high-intensity warfare," no longer the kind of police-like operation still being carried out in the West Bank, where Israeli forces roam at will.

While Israel controls access to Gaza and its sea and airspace, it has generally held to the cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza since November, despite all the Qassam missile launchings by other Palestinian militant groups like Islamic Jihad and Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which Hamas has done nothing to prevent. Hamas itself has not fired rockets since at least November, the commander said, because it wishes to preserve the cease-fire with Israel and not precipitate a major attack in Gaza.

But what worries the director of Shin Bet, the Israeli counterterrorism service, and the new commander of the Israeli military, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, is the way that Hamas is using the calm to consolidate its power in Gaza and enhance its military capacities – and not just to fight its Palestinian rival, Fatah.

The strengthening of Hamas and its consolidation of power in Gaza, reflected politically in Fatah's decision to join Hamas as a junior partner in a coalition government, is a prime reason that Olmert is resisting a push from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to talk seriously to the Palestinians about the substance of a peace treaty with Israel.

The continuing empowerment of Hamas is also behind Olmert's reluctance to embrace the Arab League peace initiative reconfirmed Thursday at its summit meeting. Israelis may want peace in principle, but they are very reluctant to give up more territory in the occupied West Bank, as they have done in Gaza, to a Palestinian Authority dominated by a group unwilling to recognize Israel's right to exist or to forswear the use of violence.

The concerns of Shin Bet and the army, their officials say, include the following: as much as 30 tons of weapons-grade explosives smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, either through tunnels or through the desert; new rocket-building expertise from non-Gazans smuggled into Gaza or from Gazans who received training from Hezbollah or in Syria; a small but unknown quantity of better antitank missiles, of the general kind used so effectively last summer by Hezbollah against Israeli armor and Israeli troops sheltering in houses; a small number of ground-to-air missiles; and the construction of Hezbollah-style concrete bunkers and tunnels in crowded Gaza that will make any Israeli infantry operation harder to carry out.

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